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People are likely to require a third Covid-19 vaccine booster shot within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has said.
According to Bourla, People may require to get vaccinated annually while variants are likely to play a key role.
"A likely scenario is that there will be likely a need for a third dose, somewhere between six and 12 months and then from there, there will be an annual revaccination, but all of that needs to be confirmed. And again, the variants will play a key role," the Pfizer CEO told CNBC during an event with CVS Health.
"It is extremely important to suppress the pool of people that can be susceptible to the virus," Bourla said as quoted by the report.
Previously, Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky had told CNBC in February that people may require to get vaccinated annually against Covid-19, similar to seasonal flu shots.
Pfizer, earlier this month, said that its vaccine was more than 91 per cent effective at protecting against Covid-19 and more than 95 per cent effective against severe disease up to six months after the second dose.
Research into the longevity of protection against coronavirus, post vaccination, is ongoing.
David Kessler, the Covid-19 response chief science officer under the Biden administration had earlier said that Americans should expect to receive booster shots for protection against coronavirus variants, as per the report.
According to a report in the Independent, persistent low vaccine coverage could increase the likelihood of the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants of coronavirus.
The efficacy of the vaccines currently in circulation can be impacted by the evolving mutations of the virus in the future, as per 77 scientists from 28 countries who were surveyed by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said the report published in March this year.
"Unless we vaccinate the world, we leave the playing field open to more and more mutations, which could churn out variants that could evade our current vaccines and require booster shots to deal with them," said Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University, as cited in a Sputnik International report.
Pfizer and BioNTech earlier this year had said that they were testing a third dose of the vaccine to better understand the immune response against new variants of the virus, as per the CNBC report.
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